Detached
by illuminazione
Summary: Part of my 120 prompts challenge. Darwin didn't remember dying. He didn't see any white lights. Just one moment he has been out of flesh and blood and the next he has been like this. Detached.


Here I am with the fourth part of my 120 prompts challenges. I loved the First Class movie and so I had to write about it. This one is about Darwin, because I thought it was very sad that he died.

Enjoy... anyway

Prompt 104: Detached

* * *

><p>Darwin didn't remember dying.<p>

Oh, he did remember the pain. The desperate struggle to keep that little ball of pure, raw, burning energy inside of him. He felt his body shifting and changing to contain the burst. Nothing worked.

He could sense himself burning up from the inside and he turned to helplessly stare into Alex' horrified face. The boy stared back, equally helpless and unable to look away from the tormenting death scene in front of him.

Darwin faintly heard the monster of a man laughing softly as if the world was just a joke and saw him disappearing along with the woman he lost his life trying to rescue.

He didn't have enough power and his usually fast accommodating body was running out of options. And then just like that he gave up, even as his mutation still continued trying to save him from his fate.

He calmly waited for the tiny bundle to explode and rip him from this world.

A world he really had just got to know.

ooo

The next thing he knew was that he somehow sensed someone crying. Instinctively he tried opening his eyes, but found that he didn't need to, because he already was seeing. It was dark, but not pitch-black. Early night maybe. The moon was shining weakly and some stars glittered in the sky.

There was chaos around him. The building was completely destroyed, large pieces of stone were lying around everywhere combined with distorted metal, shattered glass and deformed human corpses.

He had never seen anything worse than this.

However he was feeling strangely neutral about all of it. Maybe, he contemplated, you lose the care for the world, when you are dead.

Dead.

He'd always thought that death would be different. There were stories of people who'd been clinically dead and had been reanimated. They all told of a tunnel and a bright and beautiful light at the end.

Darwin hadn't seen anything resembling a light. In fact he hadn't seen anything at all. There'd been nothing like a way, or a ladder, or him slowly flying away, not even darkness or fire. Just one moment he'd been struggling not to burst apart and the next he'd been here, floating in the air, bodiless. Whatever that meant.

The sobbing distracted him from his thoughts. He turned his attention (as he couldn't turn his head anymore) towards the sound. And there they were. The people he'd come to know as friends in such a short time. He'd been closer to them than to anyone he had known before (with the exception of his parents maybe), because they were like him and he was not alone. That's why he wanted to make Angel stay so badly, that's why he was dead now.

They were sitting in between the ruins frightened and confused. It was Raven who was crying, but he could see tears glistening on Sean's, Alex' and Hank's faces, too. Too much. Too much for teenagers like them. Too much death. Too much destruction.

He realized that they also had seen him and Angel as their new family. If he could, he would've sighed.

ooo

Darwin waited with them. The moon rose high above the sky and the stars were blurred by thin clouds as slowly the dark blue brightened and the light paled. And still they waited.

They were alone. No one came to help them. It was like no one even cared that a whole CIA base had been destroyed. Had they been that secret?

He watched as they relocated to the front of the broken building. Maybe they wanted to be easier to find. And really, shortly after dawn Charles, Erik, Moira and the remaining agents arrived. Darwin wanted to close his eyes. He didn't want to see the expression on their faces when they realized what had happened. He saw it anyway. It seemed that he was doomed to stay and watch all the horrors and not be able to turn away from them.

Raven ran to hug her brother, holding on tight. Afraid. Absently Darwin heard Alex say: 'They killed Darwin' His voice hard and angry. An anger he himself didn't feel. Maybe, he thought, you stop caring once you can't change anything anymore.

ooo

A few hours later he found out that he actually wasn't dead. The realization came suddenly and it startled him.

His first thought was exhilarated and absolutely smug: 'Yes, I could adapt to that, you jackass.' And his second thought was more logical and a lot more panicked: 'How am I ever going to get back to normal.' Because apparently his body had decided that detaching its molecules was the only way not to die from the energy explosion. And while normally he took his original form again after the danger was over, this time he didn't. It was like his body had discovered that this existence was the best it could come up with and that returning to the flesh and blood would pose a disadvantage.

He didn't agree with his body. But unfortunately he also didn't know what to do. His mutation was instant and a reflex. He had totally no control over it. Now he regretted not testing and trying and training more when he first discovered his gift. He had just always assumed that his body would do what was best for him.

It occurred to him after probably twenty minutes of panic that the Professor could have possibly helped him. But now it was too late and they were gone and there was no one to save him.

He would try to reach him though, someway, because there was nothing else to do. And so began his new existence of watching and screaming in his mind.

* * *

><p>I don't believe it is physically possible to still be conscious when your atoms are apart, but - meh - let's just ignore this fact for Darwin's sake.<p> 


End file.
